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Are electronic medical records really a panacea?

March 17, 2009 — 12:46pm ET | By Ron Miller

There has been a lot of excitement about President Obama's electronic medical records initiative within the Stimulus Package, but a commentary this week suggested that perhaps the excitement is not really warranted because the gain from going electronic is not clear or non-existent at least for some users--probably not what the vendors wanted to hear.

In PC World, Ephraim Schwartz outlines several problems, chief among them being that he says electronic health records reduce profits because of the slow ROI on the initial investment for the physicians, but since the Obama package is basically paying them to get started that should reduce the pain and increase the ROI.

He also cites a lack of standards, information exchange issues and other problems that states have been working on for years to exchange health records data at the state and federal level. It's not as though we are starting from square one here, and as I mentioned in a recent story--Obama's electronic medical records requirements are within reach--my own small physician's office went electronic last year and they made the transition quite smoothly.

The biggest issue Schwartz brings up is around security and this is paramount when exchanging medical data electronically, but certainly there are a similar set of issues around paper. These issues include lack of backup, losing records and what happens to paper records when doctors retire or move. If you had a single electronic medical record that stayed with you and was accessible by doctors anywhere, anytime, it would be far more efficient and could actually save your life because all of your doctors would have the big picture of you medical background, which is not always available in the current paper system.

I don't deny that there are problems, but I also do not believe these problems are insurmountable or that they are any worse than the paper-based system we currently have in place.

For more information, see:
- Schwartz's PC World Article

Related Articles:
Obama's electronic medical requirements are within reach
Could Obama's electronic medical records plan help ECM?
Bad diagnosis for e-medical records

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Comments

By Jeremy Engdahl-Johnson | Posted 11:10pm | March 18, 2009

It’s funny how contentious issues play out: There’s the real evidence about the effectiveness of electronic health records, and then there’s the hype. We tend to hear more about the promise, less about what has been proven.

With EHR, what’s been proven is that having doctors in hospitals use the computer to enter orders that are legible, with the correct decimal point, and that can’t be mistaken, reduces medication errors dramatically. Further, the turnaround time from when an order is written until when the medication is delivered to the patient can be markedly reduced.

Just putting computers into a broken healthcare system makes it faster and more expensive – and still broken. We have other things to fix as we implement these systems if we're to accomplish effective reform. EHR is perhaps part of the solution but not the silver bullet.

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